India has deported without trial to Bangladesh hundreds of people, officials from both sides said, drawing condemnation from activists and lawyers who call the recent expulsions illegal and based on ethnic profiling.
New Delhi said the people deported are undocumented migrants.
The government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long taken a hardline stance on immigration — particularly those from neighboring Muslim-majority Bangladesh — with top officials referring to them as “termites” and “infiltrators.”
Photo: AFP
It has also sparked fear among India’s estimated 200 million Muslims, especially among speakers of Bengali, a widely spoken language in eastern India and Bangladesh.
“Muslims, particularly from the eastern part of the country, are terrified,” Indian rights activist Harsh Mander said. “You have thrown millions into this existential fear.”
India also ramped up operations against migrants after a wider security crackdown in the wake of an attack in the west — the April 22 killing of 26 people, mainly Hindu tourists, in Kashmir.
India blamed that attack on Pakistan, claims Islamabad rejected, with arguments culminating in a four-day conflict that left more than 70 dead.
Indian authorities launched an unprecedented countrywide security drive that has seen many thousands detained — and many of them eventually pushed across the border to Bangladesh at gunpoint.
Rahima Begum, from India’s eastern Assam state, said police detained her for several days in late May before taking her to the Bangladesh frontier.
“I have lived all my life here — my parents, my grandparents, they are all from here,” she said. “I do not know why they would do this to me.”
Indian police took Begum, along with five other people, all Muslims, and forced them into swampland in the dark.
“They showed us a village in the distance and told us to crawl there,” she said. “They said: ‘Do not dare to stand and walk, or we will shoot you.’”
Bangladeshi locals who found the group then handed them to border police who “thrashed” them and ordered they return to India, Begum said.
“As we approached the border, there was firing from the other side,” she said. “We thought: ‘This is the end. We are all going to die.’”
She survived, and was dropped back home in Assam with a warning to keep quiet.
Rights activists and lawyers criticized India’s drive as “lawless.”
“You cannot deport people unless there is a country to accept them,” civil rights lawyer Sanjay Hegde said, adding that Indian law does not allow for people to be deported without due process.
Bangladesh has said India has pushed more than 1,600 people across its border since May, while Indian media suggested the number could be as high as 2,500.
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